App Context

Smartphones have become our daily companions and support us in almost any situation of our daily life. We use them for communication, gaming, news reading, watching movies, payment, mobile banking and many others. From the perspective of ‘Internet of Things’, smartphones are becoming increasingly important because they can be used as hubs between the physical things and Internet. The kind of apps we install and use are closely linked to our interest, habits and personality. We constantly install, update, or delete apps on our devices to match our personal needs – thus making this data stream valuable for reality-mining. Custom-tailored content like recommendations, advertisement, personalized prices and search results can be presented to clients, based on observed apps on their devices. The method is used today by big IT companies like ‘Twitter’ in order to offer personalized tweets to their users.

The research project focus on Business-to-Consumer (B2C) in retail industry. The described method seems to have a great potential for mass personalization on mobile devices. We built a prototype for Android phones and conducted several user experiments. The goal is to investigate and enable new business and marketing opportunities in e-commerce.